In the early days of the Royal Flying Corps a certain small number of non-commissioned officers were trained to do the work of piloting, so that the officers who flew with them in two-seater machines might be freed for the more important work of observation. This experiment was not favourably reported on, and the opinion has often been expressed that men chosen from the non-commissioned ranks of the army or the lower-deck ratings of the navy do not make good pilots. A wise judgement on the question will consider all the circumstances. Promotion in both army and navy was slow before the war, so that a non-commissioned officer or petty officer was often a married man, considerably in advance of the age at which the most successful war pilots are made. The inspired recklessness of youth does not long persist among those who from boyhood up have to earn their living by responsible work. Moreover, commanding officers, whether in the army or the navy, were naturally reluctant to let their skilled men be taken from them, so that the men whom they sent to be trained as pilots were too often men for whom no other good use could be found. 'If they don't break their necks,' said one naval officer, 'it will wake them up.' Again, in 1918, when cadets, after a preliminary technical training, were graded as officer cadets or non-commissioned officer cadets, all the more promising men were given commissions, so that only men of inferior intelligence were left to become non-commissioned pilots. It is surely rash to lay stress on vague class distinctions. A stander-by who happened, during the war, to witness the management of an Arab camel convoy by a handful of British private soldiers, remarked that though these soldiers knew no language but their own, their initiative and tact, their natural assumption of authority, and their unfailing good temper, which at last got the convoy under way, showed that they belonged to an imperial race. The question of the rank of pilots is really a social question, a question, that is to say, not of individual superiority but of smooth collaboration. If a whole squadron of the Flying Corps had been staffed, as was at one time suggested, by men picked from the non-commissioned ranks, there can be no doubt that it would have made a name for itself among the very best.